With the development of a global economy, business persons who regularly travel to other countries are a fast growing breed. To meet their needs, satellite-based global telecommunications networks are being developed. The first such network was commercially activated by Iridium LLC on Nov. 1, 1998. These networks provide international wireless phone, paging, fax, and data services. Often a subscriber will have both a network wireless subscriber unit, such as a wireless phone, and a network pager. Whenever a network subscriber roams outside of his local delivery area with his pager, the subscriber must manually update his location, typically by calling in and giving his current location. The location is conventionally a code which represents a particular geographic area in which the subscriber plans to roam. When a page is to be sent to a subscriber, the signal is sent to this entire geographic area. This manual updating is time consuming for the subscriber. If the subscriber forgets to update his location or enters the wrong location code, then he will miss pages. Also, to achieve a high probability of reaching the subscriber's pager, the pager signal is sent to the entire geographic area since the subscriber could be anywhere within that area. This means that the area paged is often larger than is necessary to reach the pager, resulting in inefficient use of network resources.
Accordingly, there exists a need for a method for an automatic location update for network paging. The method should include error management to improve reliability. It should also save subscribers time, reduce the number of missed pages, and result in a more efficient use of network resources. The present invention addresses such a need.